I remember writing this! I loved the original Animal Crossing, though not as much as I love the DS one, and I wanted to write a diary. So I did! Obviously this is out of date by now, but it’s still something I really enjoyed writing. This is just a post to introduce you to my characters and friends – the rest of the diaries will be moved into a separate page in a few days, so they won’t be on the main page. Enjoy!

It’s been almost two months since I visited Eville, and it certainly shows inside my house. The cockroaches were about, but that’s okay, because squishing them is one of my favourite things to do! I found twelve June tickets which are now wasted – shame that, as I could’ve won something good. I never learn, though – I think I’ve only ever entered the raffle once. I’m not much of a gambler, you see.

Somebody’s camping… it’s Peanut! She told me to start camping. What a stupid idea – why should I get into a tent when my house is the next acre over? It’s not like I can play Donkey Kong in a tent. I smiled and nodded whilst she told me about some camping thing, then went to pick more weeds. This place sure is dirty.

Murphy shouted at me when I went to say hi. Baddie. He says I’ve only been away for seven weeks, so there’s no point getting nostalgic. I suppose he has a point!

I went to see Bea, one of my best friends in Eville. First she told me she doesn’t like the warm weather, and wants to feel cold shivers running up and down her spine, but then she told me that she always feels warm on sunny days (even without a coat), and that sunny days are the best. Which is it, Bea? I shut the door behind me and felt very confused outside. Still scratching my head, I made my way over to Blaire’s house. She wasn’t in – probably out gossiping somewhere! I caught a grasshopper and went to see Tad.

He didn’t have much to say, just telling me about Katrina (guess who’s coming to town), so I wandered over to the Wishing Well and, surprise surprise, found Blaire running around. She’s always gossiping at the Wishing Well, so for research purposes only I thought I’d ask and see if there was any gossip I’d missed out on. She did tell me she likes calendars and notebooks, so she can mark the days I come to see her, then toddled off, whistling a jolly little tune to herself. That’s about the first time I’ve ever known Blaire be that happy!

Katrina’s coming in two days – I’d better get my fortune told. I wonder what it’ll be..? Maybe I’ll be rich, or popular, or clumsy!

I met a new citizen called Sandy – she appears to be some kind of ostrich-type creature! Cool! In fact… I think she might be a road runner – she called me “speedy”, and looks a bit Road Runner-esque. Pure cool.

I popped in to see Elmer, one of my bestest buddies, and he greeted me with his cheery laugh as always. Then he went on to tell me about this scary story where he found something disgusting under his furniture, but he managed to scare himself more than he scared me, and ended up stomping around in a grump! I couldn’t cheer him up, so I decided to just leave him to it.

I don’t recognise the town tune any more. Did our new citizen Becca change it whilst she was popping through? Possibly. Maybe it’s a grower.

Got stung by bees. Nuts. I was a little scared of talking to Boots in case he laughed at my injury, but he was very understanding and told me to just “chalk it up to experience”, so I did. Then he told me to forget about getting his camera back (I already had, whoops!), and gave me a glare. I took that as a hint and trundled off to the post office. There was nothing there.

Having tidied up the town a bit, and made sure none of my friends had forgotten who I am… argh, I forgot about Teddy!

I raced across town to find Teddy’s house by the sea, even ignoring the fruit and weeds lain tantalisingly by my feet. I got to his door, completely out of puff, and knocked to find… he wasn’t in! Teddyyy!

Yey, I found him! He was in a bunch of trees. Now, what would a bear be doing in the woods..? He wasn’t very happy to see me – he told me off for shaking trees, and told me I deserved to get stung… Teddy

I was so sad I didn’t even want to get my new Donkey Kong Jr. game. How could Teddy be angry at me, and say such nasty things? I decided to lock myself in my house and go to sleep. I guess not everybody missed me as much as I missed them…

I’ve played some weird games in my time, but this trumps them all, no doubt about it.

You play a seemingly twelve-year old girl named Rami (that’s her in the picture), who wears a bunny suit. She runs and jumps like most game characters. She flies a green dragon named Spot who breathes fire. Not too bad so far.

One level involves you flying through space shooting gearstick-tops with Kings’ heads on, koala bears clinging to trees and rocket-propelled postboxes. The boss is a robotic alien in a metal bowl of some description which steals cows and turns them into steaks, which it throws at you, saying “beef is on sale every Tuesday! Madam, how about beef stew for dinner?”.

The final boss encounter takes place in the insides of an ancient Japanese beast called Apocalypse, and is a translucent heart which spews Japanese words – karaoke, shogun, ninja and so forth.

I forgot about the sumo wrestler egg-thing, which spins around on a pencil until it vomits purple liquid.

There’s more, but they’re the weirdest bits, and the game’s all the better for them.

Top marks go to top bloke Damien McFerran of www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk for selling me the game. You beautiful man, you.

What’s the strangest game you’ve ever played? Did you like it? Should games be more weird?

Today for the first time since I started this blog – which was way back in January now, I recall – I topped twenty subscribers. Although that doesn’t seem a lot, it’s quite a milestone, and my average readership has risen by 50% in the past three months. Couple that with the good news that I’ve had over 100,000 hits since August and I’m a happy man this afternoon!

 A huge “thank you” goes to all my subscribers and visitors. If you know someone who’d be interested in reading the site, tell them about it! Don’t forget you can also subscribe with the RSS feed, or via email, and with the content coming thick and fast in future you won’t want to miss any of it!

Thanks again, and keep reading, subscribing, sharing and commenting! 

I like Sonic. I like Sonic a lot.

Sonic on the Master System still ranks (in my eyes) as one of the most beautiful and enjoyable games ever created. I played it again last week and wanted to cry. The same goes for Sonic Chaos, Sonic 3 and maybe Sonic 2, on a good day.

The problem is that, since Sonic 3, no Sonic games have really affected me in the same way. I love Sonic Adventure but it doesn’t make me feel loved in return. The original games were games that loved to be played – they were tight, directed games which balanced exploration with high speed but above all gave you perfect control and set pieces which make you grin like this:

A lot of people think that the Sonic games have lost their way since the 2D days – whereas Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine seem to be perfect transitions from two to three dimensions, Sonic hasn’t fared quite so well. I don’t know why. I have my suspicions. Anyway, this is supposed to be about Sonic Heroes.

I want to like it.

I really, really do. If it wasn’t a Sonic game I wouldn’t have given it the time of day, let alone persevered with it as I have. It frustrates and delights in roughly equal measures, but it often leaves a sour taste in my mouth and has me switching it off in frustration. Just as you think you’re getting the hang of it, and you’re enjoying the speed, scenery and level of exploration, the game hits you with an annoying drop, jump or group of enemies and sends you back to repeat the last four minutes.

Some levels are very clever.

Frog Forest uses rainfall to grow leaf platforms, vines to grind on and mushrooms to bounce on. The mushrooms even use the sound effect – “blawk!” – from Mushroom Hill Zone in Sonic and Knuckles – I approve of that.

It’s all going very well until you reach the end, and the camera shows what’s behind you, instead of where you should be going. I blundered into the sea a few times before working out I had to hit the spring, at which point a classic 3D Sonic setpiece takes place – you have to escape from a giant crocodile in much the same way as the killer whale/rolling boulder/GUN truck etc. escape scenes from Sonic Adventures 1 & 2. This time though, instead of running, you have to jump from swinging vine to swinging vine, which basically means getting into a rhythm of tapping A and hoping you don’t fall to your doom. It isn’t much fun.

Some levels are wonderful.

Seaside Hill combines the familiar chequered land pattern from the original Sonic with the Emerald Coast Zone from Sonic Adventure. It’s fast and bright and vibrant and everything a Sonic game should be. I think later levels rely too much on grinding to get you from A to B, and ask you to make jumps without being able to see what’s on the way. That’s not good.

This is all going a bit NGJ, and I apologise. I want to like Sonic Heroes. No, I want to love Sonic Heroes, but I can’t seem to do it. Every time it opens up to me, with fast, smooth level design and ideas that make you smile, it sucker punches me into dying without it being my fault.

Bosses are a perfect example – the last one I did lasted over five minutes without any restart points, and is basically just reams and reams of enemies. If you get killed by the last one you have to defeat them all over again. Not good.

I still haven’t made my mind up.

Normally with my games it’s very black and white whether I like them or not, but I think my love for Sonic is obscuring my (normally very accurate) game-divining-o-vision. Maybe I’ll have to spend more time with it to work it out.

Note: I posted this on my old blog a while ago, but with the new Sonic the Hedgehog game released next week I’m willing to bet this is still relevant, particularly discussion of its faults.

I haven’t fired it up since I wrote that post last year, which pretty much damns Sonic Heroes to Sega Hell.

• No words?
• No miles?
• No news?

I realise I usually update a lot more regularly than I have been doing recently, which is down to a few things. Granted, I was never much into quantity over quality (apart from the early MSN Space days, perhaps), but I’d still like to make some excuses for your approval.

What a way to make a living!

If you’re a friend, a sleuth or a games shopper in the York area, you’ll already know one of the main reasons: I got a job. It’s not full-time so I can’t claim that’s eating up all my time, but it does mean I’m not the one in complete charge of my time any more. Fine with me – I love doing what I do.

Maestro!

I’m currently working on a soundtrack to a film called Tanner (official website), written, directed and produced by my mate Oliver Crocker, with some edits by Hannah. Far from being your typical student film, Tanner has some experienced professionals involved:

• Frank Williams (Dad’s Army)
• Tony Osoba (Porridge) and
• Bernard Wrigley (Phoenix Nights).
• It’s even got a “guest director” – Mervyn Cumming, whose CV includes EastEnders, Coronation St and Emmerdale.

The music is done by a man at home with a keyboard and a cheap version of Logic.

The film itself is well over an hour long, which is quite long to score, but so far I’ve got a good idea of what needs doing and how it’s going to sound. The best piece so far is probably Tanner’s theme, which you can listen to by clicking this link. Leave a comment on this post telling me what you think, or across in the Music page!

The tour

I honestly intended to get back on with this after returning home, but so far I haven’t done as much as I’d like for one reason or another. I did pop on the other day for 20k, and I’ll finish that off today (when I find my trainers!)

What all this comes down to, really, is this.

Since the start of October I have:

• Written over 25,000 words of my first novel, taking it from 6 pages to 71. It’s still some way short of being finished, but it’s a damn sight nearer than it was.
• Scored almost ten minutes of music for a feature film. This doesn’t sound like a lot admittedly, but it’s spread out throughout the film, rather than a continuous tune, so it’s more in reality.
• Cycled over 600 kilometres, or almost 400 miles. That’s a lot of exercise, yet I’m still quite unfit.

So, on the whole, this has become one of those blog posts in which I apologise for not posting and explain why. The site might be named after me, but it’s rare for it to be about me. That’s a bit strange really, because when I thought about it I realised I’m the unique point of this site: you can get reviews and game news in any number of other places online, and there are much better places for photos.

I never wanted the focus of this site to be me: I wanted it to be what I do and what I love, probably because I fail to believe people – other than my friends and hostages – would keep visiting a site just because it’s connected to me. However, as long as you keep coming back, I’m happy!

In other news…

Sodaware blog has just launched a weekly newsletter, which I thoroughly recommend you sign up to. You can read about it here.

Michael Jackson will perform on a UK stage tonight for the first time in almost ten years. He’ll be doing Thriller LIVE at the World Music Awards. Sadly it’s not on telly until next week (Channel Four, Thursday, probably about 9pm), but it will be.

Wii launches in the US in just four days. We have to wait almost another month, although I should get to play it before launch day with any luck. My first impressions here, of course!

Very old updates from my old MSN Space coming soon, including ramblings about Magical Sound Shower, how much a lungful of oxygen weighs and my awesome Animal Crossing diary.

Don’t forget you can subscribe using RSS or via email so you’ll never miss a thrilling post. Come back soon!

After much hassling from me, my good friend Jim Parker finally set up a blog the other day, and the first post – about the nature of play – is a cracker. Click here to read it.

Jim and I clearly see very much eye-to-eye on this issue – I would much rather play a game that gives me the chance to do something I can’t do elsewhere. Escapism into a simulated reality very rarely interests me, with the possible exception of Pro Evolution Soccer.

I enjoyed the whole article, but this section stands out to me:

I’d prefer an ultra un-realistic game to be quite honest, a game where I can fly, a game where I can do super human feats, a game with no gravity, no rules and no limits.

Although such a game would be near-impossible to design and play, the message is clear: play is our chance to take on new personae, escape the limitations of our human world and embark on new adventures, exploring fantasy worlds and our imaginations. To play is not to simulate situations we find or avoid in our own lives, but to give ourselves experiences otherwise impossible.

There’s obviously a lot of money to be made from games that simulate reality as closely as possible, but it’s a futile endeavour if you ask me. “Reality games” could end up with the same reputation as “reality TV”, another media attempting to capture our everyday lives for entertainment’s sake that often falls flat.

As a future games programmer, Jim has the chance to shape what games we’ll be playing in years to come. It sounds to me like he’s got exactly the right idea not only about what we play but, crucially, why. Let’s hope developers around the world agree, and that we start to see that reflected in their games.

Related links:

Jim Parker – game blog.

As regular readers and fans of important video game composers everywhere are aware, today was the day of Richard Jacques’s SEGA: A Retrospective concert in Nottingham’s St Mary’s Church. How was it? I’ll tell you!

SE-GA!

Sitting at the piano a little after two, Mr Jacques began with his specially-arranged version of the medley to the end credits of Sonic the Hedgehog. He played piano whilst his laptop and some very nice kit provided the rest of the orchestration, and it sounded awesome. I would have loved to have heard what he could have done with more Sonic music, but perhaps that’s next year!

Second up was Shenmue: Improvisations, another medley of all the main themes from AM2’s Shenmue. During this particular piece I was struck by how identifiable and yet versatile these themes are, as Richard transposed and intertwined them expertly.

Richard Jacques: Defender of the Future (of video game music)

After these two undeniably “big” tracks we had two perhaps lesser-known tunes: the main theme from Ecco: Defender of the Future and a very playful rendition of Diamond Dust zone from Sonic 3D: Flickies Island on the Saturn. The latter was the first Richard Jacques soundtrack I ever heard, and I learnt today he composed, recorded and mixed it all in just two weeks, which is frankly incredible considering its quality and the number of strong themes and melodies it possesses.

Following this Richard had a special guest join him on stage, long-time collaborator and voice of many Jacques tracks (this doesn’t work now I know how his name is really pronounced, but never mind), T.J. Davis! I was glad she made the concert as I don’t think any other singer would be able to do the tracks justice, but she proved she’s as good live as on record with two great versions of Sonic R’s all-time classic “Can You Feel the Sunshine?” and Metropolis Street Racer’s most poppy tune, “I Can Still Believe”. Neither of these are easy tracks to sing with lots of high parts, modulations and so on, but they did a great job between them and seemed to enjoy revisiting tracks that they recorded almost five or ten years ago! The arrangements for these tracks were also great, with a lovely crisp acoustic guitar in the background and a little gentle percussion; perfect.

A one-man Anti Music-Crime Network

Okay, so the references are a little laboured, but Richard’s performance is going from strength to strength. Of all the impressive themes from his rightly celebrated Headhunter soundtracks, he chose to perform the gentle yet evocative “Jack’s Dream”, wisely avoiding the bombast of Jack’s Theme for a more atmospheric track that sounded great again. All the main Headhunter themes were there, and again I was struck by how clearly he creates and states his themes, yet how versatile they are too. People sometimes assume classical music and video game music are closer than people would like to admit, but I find video game music tends to be more overtly emblematic and thematic than classical music; in that regard it certainly has more in common with film scoring. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

Had I not snuck a look at the next track in the – very nice – programme, I would have been very shocked and possibly even taken to hospital. The brushes, the piano, the drums… it’s Dreams Dreams! I was sincerely hoping T.J. would join him for this one, but it was an instrumental rendition instead; a little disappointing, but Richard did a great job of capturing the nuances and flavour of the original vocals. As with Sonic, I would have loved to have heard more NiGHTs music – as complex as it is, I’m sure Richard would have done an awesome job. I hereby make an extremely request for more NiGHTS music at GameCity 2007!

Last Wave

Had it been that kind of concert I would have been up and dancing like a madman to the next two tunes, a seamless medley between Richard’s Euro remixes of Magical Sound Shower and Passing Breeze. The tunes themselves are a joy to listen to in any form, but the Euro remixes are exemplary, with wonderful Latin percussion, bold brassy colours and
huge amounts of sheer fun and joy. Seeing and hearing them played live was a similar joy, and demonstrated Mr Jacques’s amazing piano skills, both tracks involving very fast modulations and fingerwork. Perhaps the best part was the awesome jazzy breakdown between the two tracks that absolutely stunned me. Tremendous.

Crikey

I haven’t even got to the best part yet. Before leaving the church I spotted T.J. Davis at the front signing an autograph for a young gentleman (who lent us his pen; much obliged!), and so Phil and I both strode forward and received lovely personalised autographs on our very nice programmes. Thanks, T.J.!

The piece de (UK) resistance

A little way away from the venue, Lee Rosie’s Tea Rooms hosted Sonic’s birthday party. The birthday boy himself attended – and gave me a hug, cheers Sonic! – as did Mr Jacques at 4pm. He was quite happy to sit and chat to anyone who came up to him, not getting near his coffee for a good half hour or so! Of course, about twenty of those minutes were taken up by Phil and I as we – mostly Phil, actually – engaged Mr Jacques in topics such as prepared pianos, who had the best Sonic shirt and how often people mispronounce his name. For years I assumed it was “Jaxx”, but recently found – thanks to UK:Resistance – that it is in fact “Jakes”. Many blushes spared there.

I can’t remember the entire conversation we had, but I do know that he was a very interesting and friendly man who seemed interested in what we had to say, gave his thoughts on various matters – we discussed how I might achieve a moody Max Payne sound for my soundtrack – and shook our hands and said perhaps we’ll catch up at GameCity next year.

Thank you

Well, with a day such as today it’s only right I make a long, detailed post. The concert itself was wonderfully arranged and performed and I would have been very happy just with that, but actually getting to talk to someone whose music I have listened to and been inspired by for years was an honour, especially as he was a really nice bloke.

Mr Jacques, thank you for the concert and taking the time to meet and talk to us. Also, if you don’t want that “spare” t-shirt, I’m sure I could find a home for it!

LINKS:

Richard Jacques’s homepage
GameCity
UK:Resistance – fuelled with Jacques love.

That’s right readers, the console timeline as you know it has been rewritten.

Watching the repeat of the British Video Game Awards 2006 – I promised I wouldn’t, but how bad could it be? – I came to have a better understanding of games. Vernon Kay made jokes about joysticks, some bunged-up woman asked “are games just for geeks?” and the most annoying of them all gave a rundown of gaming history that included the usual clichés:

• E.T. – copies buried in the desert? Check.
• Made-up technical jargon like “super-real photoanalytic gouraudalising polygons”? Of course.
• Jokes about “waggling your joystick” and “playing with yourself”? Check.

So far, so expected.

However, as the Exhumed voiceover guy says, something has gone terribly wrong.

At 1990 in the gaming timeline presented by renowned gaming journalist “some cockney guy from MTV”, the Mega Drive was praised to high heaven. It was “beefier [than the SNES], with more hard-hitting arcade ports”. Good, – this is accurate, although SNES did have some good ports from Konami, Taito and so on.

“In 1995 Sony released their PlayStation, with amazing games like [Insert titles of 3D games here], gaming would never be the same again.

Then, in 1997, Nintendo released their Nintendo 64. Blah blah Mario 64 blah blah GoldenEye. Cartridges blah 3D blah.

Sega weren’t done though. They waited patiently and, in 1998, released their Dreamcast that looked like something you would ‘find in your kitchen'”

Quite apart from the Dreamcast looking nothing like any piece of kitchen equipment EVER – what was he getting at? Does it look like his cooker? A pair of scales? The sink? – we’re sort of missing something out here.

It’s that little guy to the right there. I know it’s small because it’s only a model, but that, there, is the Sega Saturn. Just because it wasn’t a huge success doesn’t mean it should be written out of history. It gave birth to some of the greatest games of all time and, worldwide at least, hardly gave Sony the clear playing field that lots of people think they had.

Of course I’m being very selective here. They also missed out the Amiga CD32, the CDi, the NeoGeo and, I’ve just realised, the GameBoy, although perhaps these were covered in a separate segment – I switched off in outrage after realising there was no Saturn.

Games on TV – getting worse.

An even worse abuse of videogames on TV was evident in the programme “Don’t Make Me Angry” this week, in which some lad with anger management issues was offered the chance to pitch a game idea to Ubisoft.

That’s right – UBISOFT. In Paris. We’re not talking one of those crap developers who makes rubbish games like Ultimate Downhill Racer and FIFA, we’re talking about one of the world’s best videogame houses, responsible for, as I’m sure you know, Beyond Good and Evil, among others. Or, according to the voiceover:

“Developers of King Kong, Rayman and Resident Evil.”

Er, come again? How come Capcom’s name is all over the Resident Evil games? I can imagine the researcher or presenter asked Ubisoft a few questions.

Presenter: So what games have you made then?

Ubisoft: Well, we did Rayman, Peter Jackson’s King Kong and Beyond Good and Evil.

P (writing notes): … and Resident Evil. Great, thanks.

U: No no, Beyond Good and Evil.

P: Yeah, Resident Evil. That’s a game. You make games. You made Resident Evil.

In the end the angry boy didn’t even sketch or write anything down before getting the once-in-a-lifetime chance – he was on the Eurostar to Paris (you know, on his way to visit UBISOFT) and just had a blank sheet of paper. The word that springs to mind is “ungrateful“.

Following the absolutely abysmal “report” about games on the ITN news this week – in which a presenter pretended to be a character in a 16-bit platformer ON THE NEWS – I was going to make a post about why games, in fact, shouldn’t be allowed on TV, not even if they’re made by people who know what they’re doing. By comparison, my own videos seem totally winning.

Tell me what you think about games on TV, the Saturn and so on underneath.

I’m listening to Gateway To Your Dreams, from NiGHTS Into Dreams [Sega Saturn] by Sonic Team. Yes, it DID exist, DAVE BERRY.

Canny TCW subscribers will have noticed I didn’t update my Virtual Tour yesterday. Having cycled over 300km in just over a week I thought I deserved a break, so only did half my distance yesterday. I should be back to full speed today or tomorrow, so don’t think I’ve given up!

As for what I’m doing (or not!) at the moment, surprisingly it’s not playing lots of games. As usual I’m getting on with projects, both new and old, and trying to fit in doing the things I want to whilst I can. That said, I am very much enjoying Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon (GBA) and Animal Crossing: Wild World‘s Acorn Festival. I hope you AC fans are all enjoying the company of the mighty Cornimer!

Useful links

On the subject of AC, I get a lot of hits from people searching for design ideas, catchphrases and information. Unfortunately I don’t have that kind of information here, but I can recommend to you two tremendous websites that can meet all your AC needs. Links at the bottom!

Similarly, lots of hits come from people searching for info about NiGHTS into Dreams. I hope you guys enjoyed my article on it – I must write another one soon! There are good NiGHTS links at the bottom, so make sure you check them out too.

Subscribing

Aside from that, the website is doing great. I very rarely talk about how well it does, but in the past two months alone I’ve had over 60,000 hits, which is tremendous, and 130,000 since I switched servers in June. My subscribers have doubled in about a month, so if you’re one of them I thank you most sincerely. If you haven’t subscribed yet, don’t worry – it’s easy! Click one of these links and you’ll never miss an update:

Click here to subscribe
Receive posts in your email!

Thanks to everyone for visiting, reading, commenting and hopefully enjoying what you find here!

NiGHTS into Dreams:

Scoreattack.net – brilliant repository of videos, scores and tips for getting amazing scores on NiGHTS. What quality that, over ten years after its release, NiGHTS can still open your eyes like this.

NiGHTS into Dreams.com – just about everything on NiGHTS ever. Run with the same fervour and passion that Moogie used to have at Shining Force Central (not a dig, by the way).

Animal Crossing:

Animal Crossing Community – enormous messageboards and community. Allows you to keep a diary, share your town’s layout and villagers and more!

Animal Crossing Ahead – The place to go for information, tunes, patterns and designs. Lots of goodies here!

Other cool things I’m into at the moment:

Toribash – very strange but interesting turns-based fighting game, where you control muscles and joints. Hard to describe but genuinely fascinating.

JapanCast – it’s been a long time since I studied Japanese, so this informal and enjoyable set of free podcasts is helping me recover my lost knowledge!

JapanesePod101 – more free podcasts with the option to pay a subscription fee. Currently over 200 free lessons!

That’s just about it. I know it’s not the usual content I post but it was about time I did a little housekeeping. I’m sure there’ll be interesting content before the week is out!

I’m listening to Criticize, from Hearsay by Alexander O’Neal

I get a lot of hits from people wondering what the heck prosody is. Well, here’s the answer!

Prosody is the study of poetic and linguistic techniques and patterns.

As I’m an English graduate, I know most about poetic prosody, the sum total of which follows.

Before we go on, if anyone is unsure about the correct pronunciation, I had a famous (in England at least) singer record this handy guide.

If you’re more interested in who Prosody is – i.e. what my website is, who I am – you can learn more about me in the about page.

Poetic prosody

Poetic prosody is concerned with the meter and rhythm of poetry – how the line runs and scans. It’s sometimes easy to forget that poetry is meant to be heard; it has an aural tradition that stresses the importance of… well… stresses, really.

What’s a stress?

When we speak or read aloud, we naturally emphasise certain syllables. The word emphasise, for example, has the first syllable stressed – em-pha-sise; the rest is unstressed.

The way these stresses and unstresses combine creates rhythm, which isn’t the same as meter. Rhythm is the rising and falling sound that all speech naturally possesses. In fact, if you read that last sentence out, it’ll be clearer. Go on, try it.

Rhythm is the rising and falling sound that all speech naturally possesses.

Do you hear the way you stress certain parts and leave others unstressed? Well, that’s how poetic rhythm works! There’s even a special system for denoting it using / and U, but I can’t mimic it online so I won’t.

From meter you

So if rhythm is the up and down sound, what’s meter? This is the poem’s beat, and is a bit more complicated than rhythm, but let’s try to boil it down anyway.

In most English poetry, lines are divided into feet, which are groups of syllables. As we’ve seen with rhythm, syllables can be stressed or unstressed, and combinations of these create feet.

• Stress-unstress is one foot, called a trochee. Keyboard is a trochee.
• Unstress-stress is one foot, called an iamb. Sustain is an iamb.

There are more, but these are the two most common in poetry and the English language.

Lines are divided into feet, and the way these feet combine makes meter.

Remember how I said unstress-stress is called an iamb? Well, if you have five iambs in a line, that’s called iambic pentameter:

• Iamb is the type of foot;
• Pent is the number of feet: five;
• Meter lets us know this is about the measure or beat of the line.

Iambic pentameter is very common in all aspects of writing, not just poetry. William Shakespeare was particularly fond of iambic pentameter for his big speeches; it’s said to mimic the natural beat of our speech, although I’m not sure its other poetic devices are especially common in everyday chat!

Recap

• RHYTHM is the up-and-down sound that speech and poetry possesses.
• FEET are combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables.
• METER is the length of a line expressed in feet.
• PROSODY is the study of these and more poetic techniques!

I realise this isn’t exactly University-level stuff here, but as a basic introduction to prosody it serves its purpose. If you have any suggestions, corrections or other comments, do leave a comment by clicking here. I’d love to hear your feedback!

Useful prosody-related links:

Tinablue’s in-depth but accessible page
The best numberplate ever
Wikipedia’s prosody disambiguation page – useful for more on linguistic prosody

I’m listening to Orpheus [Live], from Meltdown [Bonus CD] Disc 2 by Ash